Landscaping is the beautiful art of shaping your exterior spaces and making them look as beautiful as possible. It’s a huge part of adding curb appeal to your home - and many homeowners get it wrong. You might neglect landscaping to the point that the outside areas of your property don’t do the rest of it any justice. Greenery looks overgrown or poorly maintained, and there’s nothing that jumps out to make your home look aesthetically appealing.

Well, it’s time to stand up and actually do something!

Here are some killer landscaping upgrades that boost curb appeal and make your home look a million times better on the outside.

Create Clear Garden Borders

It can sometimes be difficult to work out where your garden ends and public spaces begin. Your front lawn could spill out to a public pathway or a patch of grass that doesn’t belong to you. This creates a sense of messiness that ruins your entire landscaping - but there’s a simple way to correct it.

Improve your outdoor spaces by setting up clear garden borders to separate your home from everything else. You can go about this in many ways:

Wooden fencing
Brick walls
Paving stones
Natural hedges

The goal is to have this easily recognizable border around your garden, as well as some smaller borders inside to break parts up. It brings more structure to the outdoor space, and the entire area becomes more aesthetically pleasing and neat.

Work On Weed Removal & Prevention

Weeds will pretty much ruin any landscape by making it seem overgrown and uncared for. With that in mind, you must embark on a two-point mission:

Find and remove any existing weeds
Prevent further weeds from growing

Weed removal can take some time, but it will see drastic improvements in your exterior design. Everything stops looking overgrown, breathing fresh life into your outdoor space. You then need to implement some weed prevention tactics to keep them at bay. Consider using things like mulch around your plants or other organic means of stopping weed growth.

Add Flower Beds Around Your Home

Adding flower beds to the outside area of your home is a simple and effective landscaping technique that experts swear by. You want your house to look pleasing on the eye, so what better way to do this than by decorating the immediate outside area with layered flower beds?

We’re talking about the area of your yard that’s almost immediately next to your home, basically right up against the walls/siding. Think of it as a decorative raised trench! Flower beds add a beautiful splash of color to your home’s exterior, and opting for “layered” flower beds means you incorporate plants/flowers of different sizes to accentuate the effect.

There’s one small problem with this landscaping idea: the flower beds can be prone to flooding as rainwater falls from your roof or gets pushed through downspouts. It’s why some homeowners shy away from the idea despite how gorgeous it looks. However, it’s easily avoidable with downspout extensions that help funnel the water away from the flower beds to prevent “swamping.” When it rains, water flows through your gutters, into your downspouts, and then either around or under these new flower beds so they’re left unscathed; simple!

Install Outdoor Mood Lighting

People sometimes forget that landscaping isn’t just about adding foliage or digging up your garden. Small acts contribute to better landscaping, and they’re often extremely simple, like installing outdoor mood lighting.

A favourite idea for many is to hang fairy lights or string lights with slightly bigger bulbs around your outdoor space. Seeing as you should now have clearly defined barriers through fencing or hedges, these areas are perfect for attaching lights to.

You could also go down the route of installing flat LED lights in the ground, or hidden within flower beds, to add some more illumination. The “mood” aspect of outdoor mood lighting is the important part; you’re not creating an outdoor area that’s illuminated from every direction and as bright as the sun. Instead, you just want a bit of lighting here or there to produce a soft, warming glow. It adds to the ambience and makes your outdoor spaces look even better at night.

Implement A Garden Patio & Pathways

Functionality is another forgotten aspect of landscaping. Most people see landscaping from an aesthetic perspective, but a big part of it looks at making the outside of your property more functional. That’s where garden patios and pathways become a massive hit.

A garden patio brings instant functionality to a garden, while also upping the visual appeal. It can be used as an extension of your internal living space, almost to open your home to the outside world. You’re then able to decorate it with lovely and tasteful garden furniture, which increases the aesthetic appeal even more.

At the same time, adding a garden pathway can bring something new to your garden. Placing some lovely paving stones down your lawn splits it up and makes the garden area stand out. Or, you could have a pathway that runs down the side of your garden - there are plenty of choices, but the addition of nice paving stones with a patio just adds new aesthetic elements that pop.

Tidy Up Your Driveway

Speaking of aesthetic elements, don’t forget about your driveway! It’s one of the biggest landscaping elements at the front of your house, yet it too often gets viewed as an afterthought.

You’ll find loads of stunning driveway design ideas out there that could fit your home. Some people opt for sleek patio paving, others go for loose stones in various colors, and so on. Think about it; your driveway is basically the entryway into your home. If you don’t give it any attention, then most of your landscaping efforts fall apart.

Start implementing these six landscaping upgrades to boost curb appeal and make your home look ten times better. There’s just one final thing to remember: you need to maintain everything. These upgrades are pointless if you let flower beds die, succumb to millions of weeds, or allow your patio to get dirty. You have to stay on top of landscaping maintenance to continue seeing the aesthetic benefits.